THE EFFECT OF THE ATOMIST CLINAMEN IN THE CONSTITUTION OF BORGES’S “LIBRARY OF BABEL” Kane X. Faucher n order to better address the problem of Borges’s famous Babe- Ilian library and how it is constituted, we must scale back and have recourse to the debates of antiquity between the finite Aris- totelian universe and the infinite “all” (pan) of the Greek Atomists. Moreover, we ought to consider the problem of the seemingly in- finite permutations of the texts in the Library of Babel, the diffu- sion of the librarians, and the architectural structure of the library itself according to our provisional assertion that these are a prod- uct of the atomistic clinamen (klynamen). Borges himself leaves the question suspended as to whether this library is indeed infinite or merely apparently so (a functional infinite that denotes our lack of seizing the entire library as a conceptual or dimensional whole). We will here (re)consider an Aristotelian version of the Library of Babel to place in higher relief the more dynamic and intriguing conception of the Library as having fidelity to an atomist cosmol- ogy. The thrust of our investigation will be to determine the role of the clinamen in the constitution of the Babelian library. Borges’s narrator effectively is forced to side with the atomist view of the library, a library that is indeed a biblio-chaosmoi. The issues under consideration will include the prospect of the library’s dimension- ality as either finite or infinite, a special case of motion to support both these views, contrasting the Aristotelian and atomist view- point. Finally, we will postulate that the only access we have to Variaciones Borges 23 (2007) 130 KANE X. FAUCHER this library and its meaning is through a modified method of ana- gogical reading. MOTION The universe, according to the atomists, is distributed by means of the vortex: a kind of sorting arena by which atoms are distrib- uted according to weight, size, and shape; the finer atoms even- tually move centripetally to the periphery, while the heavier at- oms gravitate by centrifugal motion to the centre. As opposed to Anaxagoras’s formation, the vortex is not a sorting agency prompted by a Mind, but is rather an innate function of the at- oms-void relationship that abides by its own laws (be it Necessity for the Epicurean atomists or Destiny for the Stoics). The atomists will assert that the circular motion of atoms in a “vortex” has a strictly mechanical nature. This opposes the pseudo-materialist conception of Anaxagoras’s Mind as causal agent, and engages the adiaphoristic element that contradicts Empedocles’s notion that this sorting is waged on the order of innate love and strife of the matter involved. The problem of a vortex is this: if the first sys- tem is formed as a sphere, how and why does it form in this way? Is not a vortex formed along a linear axis? This problem is not duly resolved in the atomist literature since spherical formation is opposed to vortical motion. Abiding by the spherical postulate for the formation of the universe, it would seem that the atomists are more Aristotelian than expected since Aristotle asserts that not only that the universe is a sphere (representing geometric perfec- tion), but that heavier elements gradually make their way to the centre. However, the one difference between the Aristotelian and atomist conception is that for the former motion is resolved in telos, whereas the atomists assert that motion is eternal and privy to constant destabilizations and reformations. Aristotle, observing the circular motion of the heavens, and the 1 However, the use of the term “vortex” is not native to the atomist philosophy; this is the imputation given by Aristotle and his commentators. We leave it active here, but suspend it with quotation marks. ATOMIST CLINAMEN 131 vertical motion of falling bodies, concluded that there are two dis- tinct types of natural motion (forced motion being the product of a rational agent that is not the prime mover) whereas the atomists only forwarded the one: infinite motion (in the “vortex”) unless hindered by collisions. In Physics (II.4, 96a24-8), Aristotle rejects the monistic vortical motion theory on the grounds that it would be tantamount to a) accepting that the genesis of the kosmoi is aleatory rather than purposive, and, b) that such an aleatory uni- verse without a purposive organizing principle cannot admit of resolution into final causes. For Aristotle all things come to be for the sake of some purpo- sive end. Hence, animals come to be with a purpose to generate more of their species, plants have the purpose to yield fruit. In this case, all things and their existence make all possible ontogen- esis subordinate to its end. Along this line of argument, Borges’s library is endowed with a telos, a purpose by which its existential meaning will be actualized according to an essential purpose. That no such purpose has been conclusively and convincingly brought forward does not necessarily debunk that such a solution is pos- sible; i.e., that the purpose has not yet been discovered does not logically mean that there is no purpose or that it is impossible to discover. It is this “Aristotelian hope” that motivates a certain seg- ment of the librarians’ mania for retrieving this purpose from an apparent aleatory concatenation of texts. Such Aristotelians will doubtless point to the order and structure of the library as proof of its having been organized by some initial purposive causal agent, a “prime mover”. However, an atomist counterstrike on this posi- This accords with a particular idealization in modern physics. Ideal motion would run in a rectilinear fashion along a tangentially uniform vector; however, the explanation for the curvature of particle motion is described by means of ex- ternal forces acting upon that particle such as the effect of gravitation and colli- sion with other particles. This notion of minute external particle bombardment affecting movement is known as Brownian motion, but the phenomenon is much better explicated by so-called Galilean relativity insofar as the motion of particles is relative to the given coordinate system (CS) it occurs in. Since, arguably, there is no “perfect” or inertial CS, motion may be perpetual or erratic (perhaps best exemplified by the motion of an object like a Foucault pendulum in an imperfect CS like the earth which itself is a CS rotating on a solar plane, etc.). 13 KANE X. FAUCHER tion would be to assert that the mechanical nature of sorting is its own order without intermediary Mind acting as agent, and that the structure appears as though organized by a higher rational agent. This may be an unsatisfactory argument on the grounds that texts are themselves the product of some rational agent, and since they do not occur in nature, some agent necessarily must have placed them there. For the atomists, it is sufficient to explain apparent order by the innate motive nature of the atoms themselves that occasion them- selves, oriented according to their distribution of weight, size, and shape. Although Aristotle will ask in Metaphysics (XII.6 07b3) how this natural motion is possible, whence it began, the atomists will reply that the collision of atoms was caused by previous colli- sions ad infinitum, well in accord with their committed view that time and space is infinitely without beginning or end. The clinamen makes possible the existence of permutation. Left to their own motion, falling atoms descend in a rectilinear fashion (if they do not collide with other atoms); however, this line of descent represents the thinnest possible minimal line. Although the atomists were cautious not to import oblique motion as a post facto feature of their theory, they explain the clinamen as a “jumping of track” from one linear minimum to an adjacent one. Although imperceptible at the phenomenal macroscopic level, there still appears to be a kind of oblique motion from one parallel line of descent to another. Howev- er, this can be explained by claiming that the line of descent is smaller and thinner than the atom following it, and if there is even the most minute unevenness in the atom, this would be sufficient enough for it to deviate its course even slightly as a means of demonstrating how it “changes tracks.” One can map this clinamen to the constitution of texts in the Babelian library if we are willing to admit that each or- thographic figure represents the formative character of one of these linear minimums. One can imagine the Babelian library-universe as an enormous type-setter wherein the atomic orthographic unit gains its orthographic character according to what path of linear minimum it happens to be on at the moment it reaches the page (making the letters effectively atomic, a finite group of forms we may dub “or- thons”3). This would mean that we would need to import a notion 3 These “orthons” as atomic elements would need to have their law of motion ATOMIST CLINAMEN 133 that the linear minima themselves have a stable causal independence from the formation of things by atoms. This would necessarily incite the question as to what agent granted this formative power to these linear minima. If we are to assume this model of causation, then we are left with the ambiguous space of the “I know not what” that acts as a causal foundation for the nature the atoms possess in being “shaped.” However, even this explanation would falter if we hold fast to the atomist dictate, for these atoms are already given in their forma- tion as complete, and that the linear minima only “guide” the atoms along their path toward the page.